A Pan-Dialectal Documentation of Taa (formerly: Documentation of Western !Xoon)

Contributor (author):

Tom Güldemann

Date:

2007-04-25

Description:

"The relation between focus and theicity in the Tuu family" published in Fiedler, I. & A. Schwarz: Information Structure in African Languages

A Pan-Dialectal Documentation of Taa
The project is based at the Linguistics Department of the Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Head of Department: Prof. Dr. B. Comrie.
Researchers Linguistics:
Tom Güldemann, Roland Kießling, Christfried Naumann
Researcher Anthropology: Gertrud Boden

Abstract:
The paper presents first results of the documentation of Tuu languages regarding
information structure, based on the analysis of coherent texts, partly upplemented by elicitated utterances. Unmarked clauses display a fairly strict verb-medial structure; the clause-initial subject can be characterized as a conflation of topic function and agent rolecomplex and the material after it contains the assertive focus. Pragmatically more marked clauses display an initial nominal which is morphosyntactically set off from the rest of the sentence. These cleft-like constructions are typical for utterances involving contrastively focused items as well as constituent question words. At least in some languages, these structures are also associated with another pragmatic function, namely the expression of so-called entity-central thetic statements in the sense of Sasse (1987). This polyfunctionality of cleft-like sentences is motivated, because both of these functions need to expose a nominal: while it must be more salient than the predicate in the case of term focus, it must be “up-graded” from the status of topical predication base in the case of thetic utterances.